This Bookstore Is Celebrating Women's History Month in the Most Genius Way

Harriett Logan and the all-female staff at Loganberry Books knew they wanted to do something to commemorate National Women's History Month. So Logan came up with the genius idea of shelving all the books written by men backwards, leaving only the books written by women with their spines visible.

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The dedicated group flipped about 10,000 books, in a process that took two hours. Not only does the gesture highlight female authors' books by making sure they are all you can immediately see, but it also emphasizes how many more books on sale at the store have been written by men than by women. It's a gender disparity that has also been seen in other areas of publishing, like the seeming bias that agents have for book proposals by men, or the fact that prize-winning novels tend to have male protagonists, or the relatively low proportion of book reviews written by women—despite the fact that women read more fiction than men.

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Logan told the Cleveland Scene that the move was "a metaphor of silencing the male voice." In an email to ELLE.com, the bookseller wrote that all of her customers have been "positive and appreciative." The sheer visual effect of the spine-flipping is hard to deny, she said, and she hopes it has an even bigger impact on people's reading habits: "It's hard to look at the shelves and not to be moved by them. The next question is, why does this disparity exist, and how can I help balance the field? If that gains a new reader for a female novelist, or a young girl or old woman to decide to start writing that book, I would be ecstatic."

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to confirm whether it's possible to silence actual men this way—but in the meantime, wouldn't our bookshelves at home benefit from a little tweaking?